Who Has Academic Freedom? Texas A&M didn’t ban Plato — it blocked ideological cherry-picking, reminding professors that academic freedom belongs to institutions, not to individual agendas. In his initial response to the demand from Professor Sweet, Professor Peterson roared about his “academic freedom” and his putative First Amendment rights. Academic freedom is the freedom of the institution we constitute to form those collective judgments on what is to be taught, when, and to whom, and the freedom to require individual faculty to conform to them. Academic freedom is freedom of the institution to carry out its mission of teaching and research as it defines it.